A good man out of the good treasure of his heart bringeth forth well, and an evil man out of the evil treasure of his heart bringeth forth evil. (Luke 6:45)

Criminologists around the world have sought to explain the antisocial behavior through the Biosocial Theory, according to which the causes of crime lie in a conjunction of biological and social factors. On the biological side, there are three very important risk factors for violence: head trauma, malnutrition, and genetic inheritance from their antisocial parents. Major social risk factors: maltreatment, neglect, humiliation, maternal rejection, extreme poverty, overcrowding, poor neighborhood, induction of alcoholism and complete lack of care and sense of belonging. None of these factors alone could justify criminal behavior, but the sum of them is implicated in the vast majority of offenders, at least for ordinary criminals called blue-collar criminals.

Adoption studies show that children whose biological parents were criminals were much more likely to become criminals, even if the foster parents were not criminals. Identical twins are much more similar to each other in crime and aggression than fraternal twins. Identical twins, separated at birth, are surprisingly similar in their antisocial personality, even though they were raised in very different environments. These twin and adoption studies tell us that there is a significant genetic burden to aggression, but they do not tell us which specific genes are involved.

Brain imaging Technology has become a very sharp instrument for probing the anatomy of violence. This is providing concrete visual evidence that there is something wrong with the way the killer’s brain works. Adrian Reine of the University of Pennsylvania performed PET (positron emission tomography) on 41 criminals waiting on death row. In contrast to normal control, the killer shows a noticeable lack of activation of the prefrontal cortex. In general, the 41 killers showed a significant reduction in prefrontal glucose metabolism compared to the controls.

Why does incipient prefrontal functioning predispose to violence? Neuroscientists claim that this question can be answered at different conceptual levels.

1- At the emotional level, the reduction in the functioning of the prefrontal region results in a loss of control over evolutionarily primitive parts of the brain - the limbic system - that generate raw emotions such as anger. The prefrontal that is more sophisticated keeps a lid on these limbic emotions. Remove this lid, and emotions will overflow.

2- At the behavioral level, prefrontal injuries result in risk taking, irresponsibility and rule breaking.

3- At the personality level, frontal damage has been shown to result in a whole set of changes. These include impulsivity, loss of self-control, and an inability to modify and inhibit behavior appropriately.

4- At the social level, these damages result in immaturity, lack of tact and lack of social judgment.

5- At the cognitive level, frontal impairment results in loss of intellectual flexibility and poor problem solving skills. As a result: school failure, unemployment and economic deprivation.

With regard to social issues, a study showed that if four days before the school test there was a homicide on the suburb where the child lives, this reduced their reading score by almost 10 points. About 15 percent of African American children have been estimated to spend at least a month a year doing poorly at school purely because of homicides in their neighborhoods. Excessive release of cortisol in response to stress is neurotoxic to hippocampal pyramidal cells - a key region for learning, memory and impulse control. Poor school performance is related to underemployment or unemployment, correlates of crime. The social environment is much more important than imagined, as social experiences change the brain. Adults who lived near the World Trade Center buildings on September 11, 2001 - and thus were exposed to significant environmental stress - showed a reduction in hippocampal gray matter volume when subjected to a three-year brain imaging study after the bombings.

Although the Biosocial Theory is very recent, we will identify in Kardec's work elements that allow us a Spiritist reflection on this issue. The role of genes, the brain, and the influences of the environment in shaping the human personality cannot be denied. Kardec admitted that the Incarnate Spirit is under the influence of matter (The Book of Spirits, Introduction, item VI) and that there are instances when the physical evidently influences morals, such as when a morbid or abnormal state is determined by external, accidental cause, independent of the Spirit, such as temperature, weather, birth defects, a passing illness, etc. (Heaven and Hell, Part I, Chapter VII). Our Encoder also admitted that the vicious environment may have great responsibility in antisocial conduct (LE, item 644), emphasizing the role of parents in the construction of personality (LE, item 385). However, to believe that genes and the environment can be solely responsible for criminal action is, to say the least, naive and experience proves this: man is, above all, an incarnate Spirit, who brings his history, the sum of his past experiences, facilities and difficulties, virtues and defects.

In the Spiritist Magazine, October 1858, Kardec refers to an unfortunate fact published by a newspaper of the time. A terrifying crime had just been committed by a twelve-year-old boy. Young H..., known for his bad character, teamed up with five young peers and persuaded them to enter a trunk kept in a small garden house. The five children barely fit in, but they compressed and settled, laughing, over each other. As soon as they had entered, the boy closed the trunk, sat on top of it, and stood three quarters of an hour listening, first to their screams, then to their moans. Finally, when the crackles ceased and he supposed them dead, he opened the chest; the children were still breathing. He closed it again, locked it, and went to play with a kite. He was spotted by a girl as he left the garden. Reported by the girl who had seen him leave the garden, the desperate parents arrived and found the five victims - one boy and four girls from the ages of four to nine. Young H... confessed the crime with the greatest of cold blood and without any regrets.

Kardec takes the fact to discussion in the Parisian Society of Spiritist Studies and there is the following dialogue:

"Did you hear the story we just read of the murder of five children by a twelve-year-old boy?"

Answer: Yes; my penalty still requires me to hear the abominations of the Earth.

- How to explain such attitude in a child?

Answer: It is an evil Spirit. It is his own Spirit that dominates him and impels him to wickedness.

This fundamental principle - that no one has predestined crime and that every crime, like any other act, always results from will and free will (The Book of Spirits, item 861), is recurrent in Kardec's work. The good man is the embodiment of a good Spirit and the vicious man is the embodiment of an imperfect Spirit. Having someone the instinct of murder, it is his own Spirit that has that instinct.

In short: the incarnate Spirit inherits tendencies, not qualities. The trends accompany him early in life and identify with the body built by genes inherited from parents and a multitude of environmental influences. They are only tendencies, inclinations, predispositions, but not qualities, for qualities are moral values ​​and these belong to the Spirit.

Emmy Werner, a Psychologist of the University of California, disincarnated in 2017, gained international fame for her longitudinal study of 698 children on the Hawaiian island of Kauai. In the middle of the last century, she asked herself the question: Will all children raised in the worst possible environment with a wide variety of risk factors for crime become bandits? To examine this, she selected some 700 children who had different crime risk factors and followed them for thirty years. In the end, she found that a third of these children became good men.

Of all the evidences - that show that the Biosocial Theory is insufficient to explain crime - the most notable one is that of the white collar crime, where the offender does not smear his hands with blood like those of the blue collar. There are no risk factors - biological or social - related to this type of crime. It may be surprising that no biological or psychological theory has been developed for crime committed in luxury offices, within executive halls and congress, or large contractors. There are no theories of individual difference for this behavior, even on a social level - theories that try to explain how these criminals differ from the rest of us.

Asking the Spirits, in item 645 of The Book of Spirits, if when man is in some way immersed in the atmosphere of vice, evil does not become an almost irresistible entrainment, Kardec heard from them the following answer:

Drifting, yes; irresistible, no; for even within the atmosphere of vice, you sometimes come across great virtues. They are Spirits who had the strength to resist and who, at the same time, were given the mission to exercise good influence over their fellow men.